some emails from online form aren't coming through - impossible to replicate

[unwashed potato!]

http://www.thecleanforce.co.uk/online-quote/moving.php

the above site we have an online quote system. this has as far as we are aware, worked perfectly for the last 4/5 years.

now for some unknown reason we are finding that we are getting booking requests come through but the original quote isn't, which makes it impossible to find who the person is and we're stuck just hoping the customer then emails/calls to say they've not heard back.

this happened just yesterday/today. yesterday they did an online quote, the quote got displayed to the user and also emailed to them, the customer then instantly clicked book and the booking request got emailed to us along with the quote reference number.

we should have received a copy of the quote too which contains all her details and the quote ref number. the lady rang and was able to email over her copy.

on our new sites we save all quotes in a database too, however this is an old site i'm not too interested in bringing up to date so don't ideally want to have to go down the database route.

the one thing i do know which is odd, is that our quote numbers are based on the date and time, then 4 random digits. so for instance if i did a quote now, the number would be something like 121920_1234

12 being the month, 19 the date, 20 the hour.

the latest issue which i described above, the quote ref is 121708_1234 (i know from her email), but on the online booking the quote ref that came to us is 121720_1234.

it's odd as the number is only created once, but she's being shown one with 08 and we're being shown one with 20 as the hour.

anyone know how this could possibly happen?

Also is anyone willing to go though and quickly do a quote and then book it, and let me know it's done and the name they used (e.g. ocuk tester 111) so i can see if anyone is able to replicate the issue?

it's frustrating as if we're missing quotes and not knowing about it then we're most certainly losing work

 

[andshrew]

on our new sites we save all quotes in a database too, however this is an old site i'm not too interested in bringing up to date so don't ideally want to have to go down the database route.

it's frustrating as if we're missing quotes and not knowing about it then we're most certainly losing work

If you genuinely care about losing business it makes no sense to be e-mailing quotes to yourselves if you have the ability to write them straight to your database.

Although what you describe sounds like something in your code is not working correctly before the point it actually gets to sending the e-mail.

 

[AHarvey]

the one thing i do know which is odd, is that our quote numbers are based on the date and time, then 4 random digits. so for instance if i did a quote now, the number would be something like 121920_1234

12 being the month, 19 the date, 20 the hour.

the latest issue which i described above, the quote ref is 121708_1234 (i know from her email), but on the online booking the quote ref that came to us is 121720_1234.

it's odd as the number is only created once, but she's being shown one with 08 and we're being shown one with 20 as the hour.

I would guess there is some issue with 24-hour clock settings on whatever server you are using, although could it be the users time vs server time? Without seeing code to know where the time is coming from it's hard to say.

As said above, it should all be written to a database if you are serious about it, email is and will always be unreliable.

 

[unwashed potato!]

ok thanks for the advice. will write it a database too. just a pain to not be able to replicate the issue and have any clue why it's occurring.

 

[unwashed potato!]

ok just had a thought. i recently have been getting so much spam to one email that i enabled Apache SpamAssassin to auto delete spam. i've just disabled it, and automatically i get an email from this quote come through that's labelled as spam. so perhaps this is the reason, though it doesn't explain the incorrect quote ref number

 

[radderfire]

Also is anyone willing to go though and quickly do a quote and then book it, and let me know it's done and the name they used (e.g. ocuk tester 111) so i can see if anyone is able to replicate the issue?

I've just done that at 22:59.

Name Radderfire OCUK.

Booking ref 121922_4795.

Regarding the e-mail timings, you would need to ask a developer to see how the e-mails are being generated. It may be a stepwise process where the e-mail to the customer is generated in an early step, and the one to you in a later step.

What I would do is make sure that there is a short early form which takes the essential customer contact details and e-mails them to you. Then do all the long winded quote stuff in the next steps and e-mail that again. That way, you at least have the customer details so you can contact them if they don't go through with the quote.

In general, your form is rather long, and a long form like this is unlikely to convert that well, so anything you can do to streamline is likely to be beneficial. It would probably convert better if you had a very simple lead capture form, which you used to take basic contact details, plus give them a free text field to say what they want. That gets sent to you, and then you send back an e-mail with a link to the detailed quote form to fill in for them to get the exact quote. That way you capture potential customers better.

One minor comment is I found the drop down referring to stair carpets a bit confusing. When it says number of stairs, I would normally think that is referring to number of staircases, but I think it is referring to number of steps on the staircase.

You should also have a process in place where you regularly test your forms to check they are working and there isn't anything broken with the e-mail sending, e.g. a mailserver problem.